Schools feed uneven growth

The quality of schools often drives where families want to live, but that's meant decades of lopsided growth skewed toward the North Side. South Side and inner city leaders hope to change those trends.

Lori Stromberg hadn’t researched anything about the school districts in San Antonio when she and her family relocated here from Midland almost four years ago.

They chose a five-bedroom rental house in a Southeast Side neighborhood, with a homeowners’ association, trees in the yard and other children next door.

“I guess we just assumed, great neighborhood, great school,” Stromberg said.

She said she soon learned that was not the case.

Overcrowding at her son’s San Antonio Independent School District campus and delays in enrolling him, followed by two years of frustration with the school and the quality of education, prompted the family members to move. They resettled in Alamo Ranch, in far western Bexar County and in the Northside Independent School District.

Like many families, the Strombergs ultimately decided where to live based on where their children would go to school.

Almost more than any other factor, parents’ belief that northern school districts are superior than those on the South Side and in the inner city have driven the massive residential and commercial growth on San Antonio’s North Side today, as they have in recent decades.

In turn, the South Side and the inner city have captured dramatically less new development.

“When folks are in the market for a home, the first question they ask is, ‘How’s the school district, how’s the school district performing?’ ” said Al Arreola, president and CEO of the South San Antonio Chamber of Commerce.

If the districts aren’t up to snuff, families won’t buy, he said.

Parents make their decisions based largely on what they read, see and hear. Many South Side and inner-city districts often make the headlines not for high test scores, but for vicious school board infighting and political backstabbing, poor academic ratings, financial corruption and a revolving door of superintendents. Their state test scores and college admission rates tend to be lower than districts in the northern half of Bexar County.

Three of the 19 school districts inside, or partly inside, the county have been investigated by the Texas Education Agency in the past year. Two, Edgewood and South San Antonio ISDs, now are under state supervision, while the investigation remains ongoing at Southside ISD. All three districts are on the south and west sides of town.

Edgewood and South San are both losing students; enrollment dropped over the past 26 years by 24 percent and 6 percent, respectively. Nearby, San Antonio ISD lost 10 percent of its students and Harlandale gained just 3 percent.

“This is one of the worst times for public education in our community,” said Richard Perez, president and CEO of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce and a South San ISD graduate.

The overwhelming majority of the students in the southern districts are people of color who are considered economically disadvantaged — meaning they’re eligible for free or reduced-price lunches.

These factors don’t cause the problems in the schools, but rather reflect the struggles the students, teachers and administrators face.

A recent report by the Austin-based think tank the Center for Public Policy Priorities found significantly more Hispanic and African-American children in Bexar County are part of low-income families compared to their Anglo peers; Hispanic students were far more likely to be enrolled in high-poverty school districts than are Anglo students. Those districts tend to have teachers with less experience and higher teacher turnover rates, which can affect students’ quality of education.

Students who come from families that are struggling financially may not have parents with the time or experience to help them with their schoolwork. They may come from single-parent households. There may be no one in these students’ lives who can model the value of a good education, because their parents and guardians never had those opportunities themselves.

That was the experience of District 4 Councilman Rey Saldaña, a South San graduate.

His parents always encouraged him to do well in school, but they didn’t always know how to help him: his father didn’t speak English, and his mother never made it past the fifth grade. Most South San students, he said, don’t know what options are available to them.

“I know that the bar is significantly lower at South San for what excellence looks like,” Saldaña said.

The stakes are high, not just for individual students and parents but for the city as a whole.

If the quality of schools in the inner city and South Side doesn’t improve, families will continue to buy homes and rent apartments on the North Side, and San Antonio’s population imbalance might never be righted. The North Side will remain a hotbed of residential development, while many South Side and inner-city districts will continue to lose students and revenue and remain property-tax poor.

Many of the school districts in the region experiencing the fastest growth-rates are those just on the edge of Bexar County, like Comal and Schertz-Cibolo-Universal City ISDs. The biggest districts numerically remain Northside and North East ISDs.

“We’re in the core of the city and our city’s one of the fastest-growing in the state and in the country, and yet we’re not benefiting at all from the growth,” SAISD Superintendent Pedro Martinez said. “Our dream is that eventually when somebody’s looking to move to our city, that we’re not bypassed.”

How to address this North-South school divide could become a more pressing issue, because Bexar County is projected to gain 1.1 million residents by 2040. Planners and city officials warn there will be many consequences — bigger traffic headaches, more communities isolated by poverty — if all of those new people choose to live on the North Side.

That issue is at the heart of the city’s comprehensive plan SA Tomorrow, a guiding document meant to address the population influx and the associated problems and opportunities.

Committees have been set up as part of SA Tomorrow to address issues like the environment and how growth affects the military. No group is exclusively focused on education, although education is addressed throughout the plan. SA Tomorrow leaders also have met with the superintendents from all of the Bexar County school districts to discuss and get input on the plan.

The superintendents made it clear to city leaders that families don’t want to live in school districts with poor roads and poor sidewalks; in other words, if the infrastructure is bad, and the neighborhoods can’t draw new residents, the schools won’t improve, said District 8 Councilman Ron Nirenberg, one of the three SA Tomorrow tri-chairs.

Often, longtime South Side and inner-city residents don’t want to have to leave their communities just to guarantee their children will get a good education, a factor that has led to the rising popularity of charter schools and increasing frustration with traditional public schools.

That sense of dissatisfaction was on display at a March town hall meeting organized by a group of concerned South San ISD alumni and parents, including Councilman Saldaña. They have formed a coalition called South San Kids First to tackle the troubles at their district and the climate of fear and intimidation perpetuated by some school board members.

The parents and students’ frustrations perhaps were best personified by Araceli Garcia, a South San High School senior who plans to attend Stanford University this year. Even as a student at the top of her graduating class, she described a culture of limited resources and limited dreams.

“At South San Antonio High School, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t have the same amount of students going to Ivy League schools as Alamo Heights High School,” Garcia said as more than 150 people vigorously applauded.

For now, the problem is likely to get worse, said former Edgewood ISD school board president Eddie Rodriguez, who’s seen students either move out of the district or choose nearby charter or private schools.

He recalled an angry parent coming to an Edgewood school board meeting. In one hand, she held a letter saying her child’s school was underperforming. In the other, she clutched a free backpack the district had given her child. They don’t need the backpacks, she said, as she tossed it toward the trustees. They need a good education.

“The giant is waking up, and the giant is the community,” Rodriguez said. “They (parents) don’t come and complain. What they do is remove the kids. That’s how the giant is waking up. And that’s not good.”

How divide began

The roots of the North-South disparity reach back to the early 1900s, when there were dozens of school districts in Bexar County. Over time, they consolidated, often for financial purposes, Trinity University Professor Christine Drennon said. Some Bexar County school districts, like Northside and North East ISD, formed and consolidated when they encompassed rural, undeveloped areas not in the city limits.

In the past, it was deed restrictions on properties — racial covenants, that set who could buy and live where — that severely limited where people could live. So begat neighborhoods like Olmos Park and Alamo Heights, both in Alamo Heights ISD, that were racially and financially exclusive from their beginnings. Alamo Heights, incidentally, never consolidated with any other school district, Drennon said.

Edgewood ISD had the opposite problem. Early on, Edgewood was home to many poor, Mexican families who often couldn’t live anywhere else because of redlining and housing restrictions that relegated them to the city’s far edge. Unlike many of the neighborhoods in SAISD, which were at one point middle- or upper-class housing, the homes in Edgewood always were cheap, Drennon said. So, early on, Edgewood was a financial burden no other district wanted to take on.

Today, those deed restrictions no longer exist, and it’s the school districts that often drive where people live, versus the quality of the properties themselves, Drennon said. Many of those once-exclusive school districts also are far more racially and economically diverse now than they were in the past: there are poorer socioeconomic neighborhoods in Northside, North East and Alamo Heights districts.

But the effects of those past residential restrictions exist in inner-city school districts today, Drennon said. Not only are these districts predominantly Hispanic, they are less diverse than they were 25 years ago: with the exception of East Central, the Anglo populations have shrunk dramatically at all of the inner-city and South Side districts.

Jefferson High School, in SAISD, was built in 1932 to serve the predominantly Anglo, affluent families northwest of downtown.

But in 1969, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, prohibiting discrimination toward prospective homeowners or tenants based on a number of characteristics including race and ethnicity.

Former Mayor Ed Garza’s parents bought a house in the Jefferson area. He now remembers his neighborhood growing up as one of transition, with more and more Hispanics moving in. As a result of the era’s civil rights lawsuits — nationally and locally, such as Edgewood ISD suing over unequal district funding — SAISD officials passed policies meant to eliminate any advantages some of its high schools might hold over others.

Those new board policies ultimately diminished Jefferson’s position as SAISD’s shining star, Garza said. Affluent families saw Jefferson’s decline as another reason to move north, and many sent their children to Robert E. Lee High School, which NEISD had just opened. The socioeconomic inequality that created Jefferson had come full circle.

“In a sense, that was the first suburban school that created this separation of classes within the San Antonio community,” Garza said. “and then it got a taste of its own medicine many decades later.”

Voting with their feet

In more recent decades, most of the school district growth in the San Antonio region has been concentrated in Northside and North East ISDs, although that, too, is changing.

North East started growing fast a few decades ago when the neighborhoods around Lee High School, inside Loop 410, were the new suburbs. In the 1990s and early 2000s, district growth was driven by the development of Stone Oak and other suburban neighborhoods, many of them gated, outside Loop 1604.

Now the district “is getting very close to being completely populated,” said NEISD Superintendent Brian Gottardy, meaning the available land in the district is close to totally developed. NEISD has no current plans to build another comprehensive high school; there now are seven in the district.

Meanwhile, 40 percent of the new housing growth in the San Antonio region happens between U.S. 90 and Interstate 10, outside Loop 1604, an area almost entirely inside Northside ISD.

Northside continues to add students; complete build-out is years away and eventually could bring the district to 140,000 or 150,000 students, said Debbie McNierney, NISD director of resource planning. Job growth in the area continues; in-migration of newcomers to the city continues; and there’s available land in Northside.

Northside ISD now is building its 11th comprehensive high school while planning for its 12th and 13th.

But the size of the schools in Northside didn’t scare away the Strombergs. Their children ended up in Mireles Elementary, which opened with close to 1,200 students, far higher than the 800-student target for most elementary school campuses.

“I think that that’s going to keep happening, too, as long as the schools are as good as they are, and some of these school districts are really keeping up with the class sizes and the school sizes,” Lori Stromberg said. “I think you’re just going to see people flooding the areas.”

Back in SAISD, before they moved to Northside, the family was frustrated by the delay in enrolling Ryan at Kate Schenck Elementary School. SAISD had stopped seeking state waivers to exceed the 22-student cap in elementary classrooms, and all the second-grade classes in Schenck’s cluster were capped.

After researching the situation with Schenck’s principal, district spokeswoman Leslie Price said 2012 was an abnormal year for that cluster of schools, but that Ryan was only kept out of class for a week, and the following week was Thanksgiving break.

But once enrolled, Ryan — who had received gifted instruction in Midland — was far ahead of his new class. The teacher would use him as an example, which led to bullying, he and his mother said.

It didn’t matter that by the time the Strombergs moved to the school, SAISD graduation rates and state accountability scores were improving.

Stromberg said she was disappointed in the lack of gifted programs and art classes, and that students only had music once a week. Her son Dylan also was enrolled in Schenck for his kindergarten year. He finished the year knowing his alphabet and his numbers, which he knew before he started, Stromberg said.

Schenck had an “enrichment program” in the library for students who are ahead, Price said, but it’s a low bar compared to the full-fledged gifted programs in some other districts and to the level of rigor SAISD is trying to achieve with retooled gifted programs. The district’s 2010 bond should provide new art rooms and an art teacher, Price added.

But when Stromberg was faced with a sheet of paper asking whether she would re-enroll her sons at Schenck, the answer was no. Eventually, the family moved across town following the suggestion of a real estate agent, who praised the schools in the area.

Now the family, children included, has few complaints about their schools. A sister, Rebecca, just finished the first grade at Mireles, along with her older brothers. Every day, the children have physical education or an arts activity, sometimes both, Stromberg said. Ryan is back in a gifted program, plays the violin in an orchestra before school, sings in the choir and joined the astronaut club.

Question of reputation

Even as more families are beginning to eye school districts on the city and county’s far northern edges, Josie Scales is happy to stay right where she is, in Harlandale ISD on the South Side.

Three generations of Scales’ family have attended Harlandale schools, starting when her parents moved to the area in the late 1950s when she was 11.

“Harlandale is like a big family,” said Scales, who has previously served as chairwoman of the district’s bond oversight committee.

Hers is a refrain often heard in this tight-knit, South Side district that also is one of several on that side of town that’s growing, though only slightly. Harlandale’s student population has increased by 3.36 percent over the past 26 years, from about 14,595 students in 1989 to 15,086 this school year, by the TEA’s count.

“We’re getting just as good an education at Harlandale as they do in other school districts,” Scales said, praising the close personal relationships administrators have with students but also academic achievements, like Harlandale’s opening of a STEM Early College High School in August.

But for all the pride in the district, and the population growth, Harlandale’s overall academic record still remains below that of the northern districts.

This year, 64 percent of fifth-graders and 74 percent of eighth-graders in Harlandale passed the State of Texas Assessment of Academic Readiness, or STAAR, reading test, on the first try. Only 68 percent of Harlandale students in both grades passed the math exam.

In contrast,82 percent of fifth-graders and 90 percent of eighth-graders in North East ISD passed the reading tests. In math, 84 percent of fifth-graders and 75 percent of eighth-graders passed in NEISD.

People say testing shouldn’t matter but it does, said Rodriguez, the former Edgewood board president and principal of Harlandale’s STEM Early College High School. STAAR scores are, in many ways, the easiest way for a parent to determine quickly how well a school district is doing.

The academic quality of schools in South San ISD has convinced alum Crystal Cruz not to send her children there, though she lives in the district. Currently, she pays for her daughter to attend the city’s Pre-K 4 SA program. She hopes to eventually enroll her in an IDEA charter school or a private school.

Cruz is choosy because she knows from experience the critical role school district quality plays.

She did well throughout primary and secondary school, never struggling with her coursework. But when she got to University of Texas at Austin, she was unprepared for the school’s academic rigor. Fall semester of her freshman year, Cruz got a “C” in one of her classes. It was then she realized that she had no idea how to study and had never read the books her college peers had read.

“I don’t want it to be that difficult for my kids,” Cruz said.

It’s a sentiment even Saldaña, the District 4 councilman, has expressed about South San, though he managed to excel enough in the district to be admitted to, and graduate from, prestigious Stanford University in California.

Like Cruz, he had to play a lot of catchup his first three years at Stanford, particularly in writing and math. He can remember college papers marked up in red pen.

“I was just not ready for any of the work, the basic work as a freshman,” Saldaña said.

Besides the academic troubles in some of these school districts, people’s perceptions about them are influenced by what’s happening at the school district board meetings, said Arreola, the south chamber president.

Last year, both Southside and Edgewood lost their superintendents; both districts now have seasoned replacements, though Edgewood’s was appointed by the state. The South San ISD superintendent filed a complaint with the TEA against his own school board. Harlandale long has come under scrutiny for its relationship to its bond manager, Jasmine Engineering, which has been given jobs without the district seeking other bids.

This year, the TEA named a conservator to help oversee South San, citing the school board’s failure to work with executive administration and also concerns about the district’s financial management.

The state has taken an even bigger step to address problems in Edgewood, appointing both a conservator and a board of managers to replace the trustees.

The list of administrative problems goes on.

It’s not that Northside, North East or Comal ISDs are immune from scandal or that the South Side districts have no good academic programs.

“A kid can get a good education at South San, Southside, Southwest and Harlandale,” said Norman Dugas, a prominent San Antonio developer. People just assume the South Side and inner-city districts are bad.

Scales, from Harlandale, believes North Side residents view the South Side as an area with fewer shops, fewer things to do, a place to fear, and so that attitude extends to the school districts. The North Side has experienced a tremendous amount of growth. On the South Side, Scales said, “we have basically stayed the same.”

When you’re stagnant, she said, things decline.

Turning a district around

But SAISD, in the heart of the city, is perfectly positioned geographically to take advantage of a renewed emphasis on inner-city living.

Garza, the former San Antonio mayor and now an SAISD trustee, recognizes there’s a market in the inner city now for new buyers. He decided to run for the school board after fixing up the house next door in his historic Monticello neighborhood, which attracted so much interest that he started restoring other homes.

But while empty-nesters and young professionals never asked about school quality and reputation, families with children always did before they agreed to drop $230,000 on a historic property. The answers didn’t always please them.

When Garza first joined the school board, SAISD’s dysfunction rivaled the most ill-reputed South Side districts. Trustees feuded among themselves and with the superintendent at the time, deadlocking progress as the school district failed twice to meet state standards and received an accreditation warning.

Then-Mayor Julián Castro got involved in the board’s 2011 elections, saying his SA2020 plan could not be achieved without SAISD’s improvement. Former City Councilwoman Patti Radle, now SAISD’s board president, was elected that year. The district hired Sylvester Perez, who had retired as superintendent of Midland ISD, as interim leader in 2012, making the job permanent the following year. Perez retired last year as SAISD superintendent but was recently appointed to the same post in Edgewood ISD.

But the process of turning a school district’s fortunes around, after decades of poor performance, is a difficult one.

SAISD had 19 failing campuses in the 2014-2015 school year, TEA data show.

Only 22 percent of the students at Mireles, where the Strombergs moved in Alamo Ranch, were economically disadvantaged in the 2015-2016 school year, compared to 90 percent at Schenck, the SAISD school they left, according to TEA records.

Martinez, the SAISD superintendent, knows those numbers can make all the difference when it comes to educating children.

“It affects their aspirations,” Martinez said. “It makes the work that much harder for us because if a child lives on the East Side or lives in a poor neighborhood and can’t see themselves being successful, that’s more work for us.”

It’s work the district refined in the past few years under Perez, and some parents were happier for it.

In 2009, Sam Houston High School on the East Side was on the brink of closure. Its enrollment had dropped below 800 students, smaller than many elementary schools, and it repeatedly failed to meet state and federal educational standards.

A community outcry saved the school just before a well-timed federal grant financed its New Tech program, rooted in project-based learning. Now the high school enrolls about 1,000 students and meets state standards. New Tech has since morphed into an engineering magnet program that allows students to earn college credit.

But Martinez said SAISD is getting “hints of blame” for the exodus of middle-class families from San Antonio’s urban core. In response, he rolled out a five-year plan this fall to combat declining enrollment by drastically raising the bar.

Under Perez, SAISD improved remedial education for students lagging behind. The next step, Martinez said, is his “Redefining Excellence” proposal, which focuses on students who are at or above grade level.

The plan calls for 70 percent of schools in each of the district’s seven feeder patterns to achieve an “A” or “B” grade from the state by 2020, and for 80 percent of district graduates to go to college, up from 52 percent now.

Those are just some highlights of a long list of specific goals with numerical targets.

But Martinez’s plan was met with some skepticism last fall, when he presented it in a series of community meetings. Garza supported the plan, but still saw the potential for setbacks. Faster results would require strong campus leadership at every school in a district with high turnover, Garza said. And the district will have to do something that’s unusual for educators: talk to developers.

“How do you sustain it if the neighborhoods are not changing?” Garza said. “We don’t have the housing stock, for what the market expects today in a house, that competes with Northside or North East.”

The city’s SA Tomorrow comprehensive plan recommends policies that call for infill development and adaptive reuse of underutilized or abandoned structures in the urban core. If that kind of redevelopment takes off, districts like SAISD may have to prepare for different demographic assumptions if their school populations begin to increase, said John Dugan, the city’s former planning and community development director.

Efforts like South San Kids First are also bubbling up to address the school problem. Public education remains a priority of the South San Antonio chamber, which pushed several education reform bills during the last state legislative session.

“This is a business,” said Rodriguez, the former Edgewood board chairman. “It’s like H-E-B. If I don’t like H-E-B, I’m going to go to some other store or some other restaurant and you’re not going to get my business. Educators need to do the same thing.”

Last year, South San graduate David Plata was faced with a choice similar to the Strombergs: buy a house or land north of Loop 1604, in Northside ISD, or buy his parents’ old house in South San.

It was a difficult decision. He is the father of three little girls. When he was thinking about purchasing the home, Plata’s oldest daughter was about to start kindergarten. The commute to work would have been much shorter if he lived on the North Side. The amenities and the infrastructure are better there.

He was close to buying the North Side property. But he stopped himself and instead decided on his longtime home, on the neighbors and the friends he was comfortable with and had known all his life. South San first.

But the trepidation about his decision remains. He wants his daughters to be fully prepared, so they have career choices.

Plata admits he and his wife have discussed private schools.

He thinks back to his time at South San. No one pushed him to take the SAT. He never took a math class after his freshman year, because he’d finished the minimum requirements. Then, he went to college and found himself incredibly far behind.

Now he works in construction, doing estimating, and uses math all the time. He knows the value of education, where it can take you in life.

So maybe some of that was his lack of motivation back in school. But maybe somebody at South San could have helped him.

“Why didn’t anyone push me to do that?” he asked.

vdavila@express-news.net

amalik@express-news.net

Northward bound

School districts on the North Side have long been the region's largest and most highly rated. But school districts mostly outside of Bexar County, like Comal and Boerne ISDs, are beginning to draw students at an even faster clip.

Every morning, kindergartner Coleby Keith eats his Fruit Loops at least an hour before the sun comes up. The moon still is high when he climbs the steps into the school bus that will ferry him along the winding, rural roads of southwestern Comal County, to his elementary school almost 11 miles away.

“I just saw a falling star!” he declared one chilly school day in October as he stared out the bus window into the early morning dark.

Nichole Keith, center, her son Coleby, 5, and her daughter Ryleigh, 4, right, get ready on an October morning. Coleby rides the bus for 45 minutes to Rahe Bulverde Elementary in Comal ISD. (Bob Owen / San Antonio Express-News)

Coleby’s predawn, 45-minute bus ride isn’t surprising in Comal ISD, an enormous district encompassing 589 square miles, larger than the city of San Antonio. The district crosses into five counties, including Bexar, and also serves students living around Canyon Lake. Its headquarters, in New Braunfels, is 36 miles from Coleby’s home near Boerne.

Over the past 26 years, Comal ISD’s student population has jumped from 5,400 students to more than 21,000 this year — a 288 percent increase, the highest in the region.

Most of that growth is concentrated along the U.S. 281 and Interstate 35 corridors, following a housing boom in those areas. The district’s school buses travel, on average, a combined 17,000 miles a day.

But this population boom isn’t limited to Comal. Once rural school districts that are located partly, or entirely, outside Bexar County are starting to experience big enrollment spikes as these areas increasingly urbanize.

“All across America, rural areas near cities are starting to grow,” said Dale Adams, president of the Boerne ISD board. That school district has grown 201 percent since 1989, to a total enrollment of about 7,900 this school year. “The schools are one part of it. … Everybody hears about it, and then so they go, and then everybody else hears about it, and so they go.”

Many in Boerne ISD feel the area is growing too fast to keep its small-town feel. Traffic on Interstate 10 and the farm-to-market roads has grown congested even by big-city standards.

Adams and his wife chose Boerne while living in England, where she was stationed at an air base there. With a transfer planned to the San Antonio Military Medical Center, the couple wanted rigorous schools for their three children. Seeing Boerne’s statistics, including graduation rates and SAT scores, they thought, “This is perfect.”

Adams said he didn’t want schools to grow so large that the students most in need of individual attention — the gifted students and those lagging behind — start to fall through the cracks. The district’s enrollment is projected to grow by more than 4,000 students in the next decade. In response, voters in May approved a $175 million bond issue to fund two new elementary schools, a middle school and other improvements.

“We just see steady growth and we don’t see it slowing down anytime soon,” Adams said.

Growth’s new frontier

Northside and North East ISDs traditionally have experienced the most student population growth in the Bexar area, and they both remain the region’s most populous districts.

But that was part of the problem for parent Trini Fernandez when she was looking for schools five years ago for her two little daughters.

Fernandez and her husband, Luis Cisneros, were living in a small house near SeaWorld on the far West Side in Northside ISD. When the girls still were toddlers, Fernandez began to look into the area schools but didn’t like what she saw. Across the street, at the newly built Stevens High School, teenagers were fighting and spraying graffiti. Although they were in Northside ISD, based on state ratings “the schools over there were not as good as the ones over here in the north area of San Antonio,” Fernandez said.

So the family started looking for homes in the Stone Oak area in North East ISD. But Fernandez thought the closest elementary school was too big, at about 1,200 students at the time.

So the family members checked out a house in Lookout Canyon. They had no idea at first it was in Comal ISD.

“I thought when they said Comal that we were talking about New Braunfels,” Fernandez said, echoing a popular misconception.

The family fell in love with the neighborhood, the new house and Specht Elementary School, at the time less than half the size of the closest NEISD elementary campus. Fernandez also liked the neighborhood’s small-community feel, anchored by the school.

But unlike Comal, SCUC doesn’t have a strong commercial base: the vast majority of the growth happening within SCUC is residential. That means more students, but not the kinds of revenue increases new commercial development would yield.

The fastest-growing school districts in the area generally hold bond elections every three years, for tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to build new facilities.

Sometimes voters balk at the price tag: a $451 million bond was defeated three years ago in Comal ISD. The district successfully passed a much smaller bond last year that addressed the district’s immediate needs for two new middle schools.

It plans to return to voters in a few years to help fund construction of a new high school. By that time, both Canyon and Smithson Valley likely will be at 3,200 students each, well over their current capacities.

Boerne ISD is gaining a wealthier student body as the district grows. About 18 percent of students were economically disadvantaged last year — almost 3 percent fewer than in 2010 and a lower percentage than even Alamo Heights ISD in Bexar County.

The wealth has placed Boerne ISD on a list of property-rich districts that have to pay some money back to the state under the “Robin Hood” system. Last year, it paid 13 cents on the dollar, or $8 million compared to an operating budget of $63 million, which administrators call a big bite for a district scrambling to afford its own growth.

“That is our most difficult financial situation,” Boerne ISD Superintendent David Stelmazewski said. “We continue to struggle with the funding formula of the state of Texas and we just don’t think it’s sustainable.”

A legislative rewrite of the funding system that would have reduced the number of districts forced to send money back to the state died last year. Leaders of fast-growing property-wealthy districts were especially disappointed.

School districts both rich and poor have sued the state repeatedly over the past three decades, challenging the school finance system. A district court judge ruled two years ago that the system was unconstitutional. But the state appealed. On May 13, the Texas Supreme Court ruled the state’s system for funding public schools is constitutional.